Be More Productive Using AI

6 min readOct 24, 2024

You can use the powerful Generative AI models to make much more in less time.

Image generated by AI using DALL·E via ChatGPT.

Introduction

Generative AI is everywhere. Big tech companies are racing to offer the next disruptive breakthrough in AI. All the big companies want to provide at least one of their products with the label “powered by AI”.

This is a good thing for customers like us. We are each day more surrounded by AI-powered products that make things easier, not to say cheaper.

Let’s face it: a couple of years ago, if we wanted a professional head picture for our social media, we had to find a studio or a photographer to have that created. Or, if we needed a resumé analysis, the best deal was to hire a professional. Now, a few clicks can make that happen with AI-powered software.

We are surrounded by AI. More and more, each day.

Like it or not, it looks like we all will have to deal more and more with AI in our routines. And being that said, why not make to take advantage of these powerful models available? Why not use them in a better way to make our lives easier?

In this post, I want to show you a couple of tricks to up your game using Generative AI.

Let’s dive in.

Better Prompting

Ok, using AI models seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it?

Open a browser, navigate to ChatGPT, Gemini, or Llama website, and start prompting. In essence, it works like that. But I hate to tell you that using AI with generic prompts will not bring us the best results, or sometimes not even what we are looking for.

So here is the first tip.

More generic prompts lead to generic output

The more generic your prompt is, the more generic the answer will be. So, if you prompt AI to “write a Facebook post”, it will just write a post with any subject, with the length it thinks it’s the best, and using whatever tone it wants. We gotta be specific, give the model more information, lead the way.

A version like “Write a short Facebook post to promote a sale in my store this weekend. Let the customers know that there will be up to 50% off” will yield a much better result.

Provide context

Another good trick to get the most out of an AI model is to provide context when prompting. By that, I mean to tell the AI what you are doing, what you are working on, so it has more background information to work with.

For example, if we are writing an e-mail and need help from ChatGPT, it is a good practice to let it know what is the context behind that e-mail, for the purpose of audience/ language adaptation and tone.

A good context could be “I need to write a commercial email for thanking the first clients that bought my new product A (…)”

With that, the AI model already have good information like: (1) the email is commercial, so business relationship; (2) the e-mail is a thank-you note; (3) clients are buying a new product.

Structure your prompt

When a complex request is needed, the best thing is to structure well the prompt, such as using bullet points, or writing step-by-step instructions.

Another option is to break down the request in smaller tasks and separate the prompts, a technique referred to a Chain Prompting.

Give examples or instruct how to output

Last, but not least, use examples or instruct the model how you would like to see your output. For example “Provide the output on a table where column A is the content A, and column B is the content B”.

Or you can also give examples, such as “I would like the output to be like this ‘The answer for this question is ABC’ ”.

As we see, prompting can be much more interesting than just writing a few words. The more you tailor your prompt, the better the result is going to be.

But how does that affect our productivity? That is a subject for the next section.

Be More Productive

Work, work, work…

Sometimes, that is all we see in front of us. There has never been a time with more work, but also there has never been a time that allowed us to be more productive than ever like now.

We can leverage AI to deal with repetitive tasks, kick-off our creativity, help us learning a complex concept, and much more!

Who never thought how good would be to have an assistant to take some tasks out of our hands? That assistant can be AI. Think which tasks you could delegate to an assistant and probably it is eligible to be performed by AI.

Want some ideas?

Writing e-mails
Summarizing texts and/or documents
Creating meeting minutes
Reading long and boring contracts and giving you the 5 takeaways and 5 risk points
Creating a new workout session
Giving you ideas for your dinner
Helping you plan a Thanksgiving gathering
Planning your weekend getaway.

All of that and much more. It is just a matter of prompting.

Explore and Discover

Finally, we can explore the many capabilities of ChatGPT. If you open the chat, you will notice the link Explore GPTs on the upper left-hand side. If you click on it, there is a page with several fine-tuned GPTs for many areas of our lives: Productivity, creativity, writing, research, analysis, etc.

Some of them are in my new book Your AI Partner: How Generative AI Enhances Efficiency, Creativity, and Learning in Everyday Life, already available on Amazon.

I suggest you take a look at these GPTs:

The images in this post were created by DALL•E. What do you think of them?

I used the Write For Me GPT to ask it to write the Preface and Closing section of my new book.

I tested the Resume GPT to know if my current resumé is competitive and well written, and I was surprised by the analysis and all the enhancements it pointed me to do.

Go ahead. Explore, try. Do!

Learn More

If you liked the content of this post, I have good news for you. I have just finished writing my new book about this very same topic: How you can make your life easier and more productive using Generative AI.

The Chapter 1 elaborates on what is Generative AI and how it affects our lives. Chapter 2 brings a comparison of the main models available. On Chapter 3, we cover the fundamentals of prompting and best practices of Prompt Engineering. Chapter 4 is all about practice and use cases.